A Reflection on Priest Sung-chul′s Nirvanic Song

성철 스님의 열반송에 관한 일 고찰

This paper aims to infer conversational implicatures from Chief Priest Sung-chul′s Nirvanic song in light of the Buddhist view of language and its communicative functions. Zen-dialogs in which nirvanic songs are classified are defined as rational dialogs, which in fact observe the rules of conversation such as the ones proposed by Paul Grice (1975) even though they apparently ignore the rules. This paper also addresses the formal characteristics of the Priest′s nirvanic song and argues that the song exploits the rules of conversation using the whole song as an implicature trigger. Taking it for granted that Chief Priest Sung-chul holds the view on language and its communicative functions just as specified in the Doctrine of Mere Consciousness, which is one of the major tenets of Korean Buddhism, especially of the Chogye order, this paper tries to explicitly show and systematize the language-to-world relationship, which is only alluded to in the Doctrine of Mere Consciousness. This paper also refines the assertion of the doctrine as to the nature of language, which maintains that language is not associated with either the mind or outer objects (that is, an unassociated dharma), and is "a shared thing among shared things." This shows that language continuously interacts with the mind in a different way from the ones in which associated mental activities (caittas) interact with the mind and that accordingly, language is "an unshared thing among shared things."